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Friday, September 18, 2009

Waking the Dead: Series 8, Episodes 3 and 4: End of the Night

12:49 PM / Television / No Comments

Written by Ed Whitmore; Directed by Dan Reed

Apologies for skipping over an entire series and a two-parter, but I wanted to write about this one while it was still fresh in my mind. (I'll come back to Series 7 at a later date, I promise.) The reason? Because it was, hands down, the best episode of Waking the Dead I've seen in years. I had high hopes for it when I learned that Ed Whitmore, the show's former head writer and the man responsible for my all-time favourite episode, Thin Air, was returning to the fold to pen it, but I never in my wildest dreams expected it to be this good.

Admittedly, it's a fairly simple story and, at least by Waking the Dead standards, remarkably free of shock twists and complex plot developments. Basically, the story is that, a little over a decade ago, eighteen-year-old Gemma Morrison (Michelle Dockery) and her ten-year-old brother Shaun were abducted by two men, who raped Gemma and then threw both of them off a bridge. Gemma survived, Shaun didn't. Years later, on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, a drunken Gemma seemingly attempts suicide by driving headlong into a tree, leaving a cryptic note bearing the plea "FIND THEM" on her dashboard. The note ends up in the hands of Boyd, whom Gemma had repeatedly pestered to re-open the investigation prior to her suicide attempt. For whatever reason (Guilt? A fear that Gemma may try to take her own life again if he doesn't?) Boyd does so, despite a complete lack of new evidence and the incredulity of the rest of the team, among them new recruit Kat Howard (Stacey Roca).

What follows is one of the grimmest and utterly engrossing two hours of television I've seen in quite some time. Whereas recent episodes of Waking the Dead (since the regime change at the end of Series 5, really) have sidelined the psychological aspect in favour of increased emphasis on forensics and generic plod work, psychology absolutely returns to the forefront here, with Grace finally getting to do more than briefly exit her office to offer some vague psychobabble which ultimately contributes nothing to solving the case. Here, we spend time with her as she profiles the two rapists, constructing their divergent personalities and delving into just what drove each of them to abduct and rape Gemma Morrison. (At one point, she says to Boyd: "You wouldn't question there being different reasons for people to commit murder. It's the same with rape.") It's not really a whodunit - as soon as we meet each of the two suspects, we know beyond any doubt that they're guilty - but the intrigue lies in finding out just why two men from completely different backgrounds and with completely different personalities and motivations would join forces.

The theme of Series 8, apparently, is that of strong women succeeding against seemingly insurmountable odds. Last week's episode, which saw long-running character and strong woman Stella Goodman felled off-screen by deep vein thrombosis, undercut this quite spectacularly, but it was far more in evidence this week. Gemma and her older sister Zoe (Kate Fleetwood) were magnificently characterised and acted, the relationship between them coming across as utterly real. Gemma's refusal to conform to the conventional template of the victim is brilliantly realised in a scene in which, when told by a married man with whom she has been having an affair that they can't do "this" any more, she merely shrugs and says "Okay, let's not do it any more." Clearly anticipating a stronger reaction, he merely stares at her. "Well, what d'you want me to say?" she responds glibly. "'Oh Andrew, please don't end it - not now when I'm weak and vulnerable'?" The construction of Gemma as a survivor - and perhaps more importantly someone willing to manipulate others in order to survive - means that the outcome (which I won't spoil here) is somewhat inevitable, but it's exhilarating every step of the way, and the open-ended climax with its refusal to tie things up in a neat package left me wanting more but at the same time knowing it had ended at precisely the right moment.

As for the regulars... well, as Grace correctly pointed out to Spence, Boyd was back to his old self. He was rude, loud, insensitive and obnoxious, but he was Boyd, and in his quieter moments he came together as a three-dimensional character filled with quirks and foibles. It's still not quite the same without Frankie and Mel, but in terms of the team's interaction this two-parter was much closer to "classic" Waking the Dead than any other episode in the last few years. Boyd's debate with Grace about which of them had the weirder job - "Your job's all abstract, isn't it? Nothing concrete - you deal in sort of airy-fairy stuff. At least I get down to the nitty-gritty..." - almost brought a tear to my eye and made me realise just what the show had been missing since the end of Series 5: the banter. In fact, the old multi-layered interplay had been absent for so long that, when Spence's old DI rebuffed him with the line "Don't flirt with me, Spence - you're married," I initially took it literally. It wasn't until later that I realised she was speaking metaphorically, Spence's "marriage" being his involvement with the Cold Case Squad and his "flirting" being his not entirely subtle hints to her that he is unhappy in his current job and looking to move on.

My one slight criticism as regards this storyline was that I was left with a nagging feeling that more could have been done with Gemma's sister, Zoe. I spent the bulk of Part 1 wondering why she was being so tolerant of Gemma's mood swings and passive-aggressive abuse, and got to thinking that her behaviour seemed awfully like that of someone who felt incredibly guilty and was attempting to compensate or atone for past actions. I came up with a theory that Zoe had in fact known the rapists (or one of them, at any rate), and that they had targeted Gemma either mistaking her for Zoe or in order to get back at Zoe. In reality what was going on was nothing like as complex as this, and I was actually slightly disappointed that, ultimately, Gemma was in fact picked by the rapists at random and that Zoe simply doted on her because "she's my sister... she doesn't have to be grateful for anything." Still, you can't have everything, and on reflection I think I'd have been more disappointed in the long run if I'd managed to successfully work out the outcome before the end of the first hour. Anyway, you can't have a good mystery story without at least one red herring.

End of the Night was terrific. It completely reinvigorated my interest in Waking the Dead and left me eagerly anticipating the remaining two two-parters of the current series. The next one, Substitute, is also written by Whitmore and is therefore in safe hands, while the finale, Endgame, is being handled by a former Casualty and Holby City writer, Andrew Holden. I can't say with any certainty that I know how these will turn out, but I'm optimistic: End of the Night showed that there is without a doubt life in the old dog yet.

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